Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and philologist who was known only to a small circle of writers and intellectuals during his lifetime, became one of the most celebrated and controversial thinkers in the following century, with an intellectual legacy rivalling that of Hegel and Marx. Like those two, he held Spinoza in high esteem. Unlike them, however, he did not spend much time on reading Spinoza’s text firsthand. Recent scholarship suggests that he might have based his judgments and impressions exclusively on the account provided by Kuno Fischer in his popular textbook on the history of modern philosophy.